This has been a month of months, teaching three classes at two different universities with two very different models for their everyday operations. Not to mention, another Al Jazeera article taking up my time, working on my latest “book” idea, and so many familial and parental events to attend and issues to address. Where did I have the time for all this when I worked full-time in the nonprofit world? Oh yeah, that’s right — I didn’t have the time for all this back then!

And of course, there’s today, my Mom’s 71st birthday (Happy Birthday, Mom!). I’ve written plenty about Mom on this blog over the years. Lots of what I’ve written has been in the negative, and even eye-opening to me at times. My relationship with Mom has always been complicated, because our respective lives together were hard and horrible, with few moments of joy in between. There were so many moments of boredom, of wishing for a prosperity that never came, along with stacks of violence and threats of violence. Mom was abusive and vain, could be caring and defiant, and was prayerful and profane, all while I was growing up.

So when I say I love Mom, but I don’t like her, I hope it’s something folks can understand, even relate to. Mind you, this isn’t an expectation, because I write often for two people: myself, and that random person one of my posts might help. But in the past few months, on this issue, my friends and Twitter folk have let me down a bit. At least two people I’ve gotten to know pretty well have told me that to discuss my Mom warts and all is a no-go zone. “You can’t be talmabout yo’ mama like that! Hell wrong witchu, boy? That yo’ mama, fool!” Or, the more sophisticated approach: “Your mother is a victim of systemic racism and misgynoir, Donald, so cut her some slack!”

Hmm. It’s funny having folks who otherwise don’t believe in any sacred idols (cows or otherwise) tell me how I should view Mom, as if they were in the same room with me when she beat me with an extension cord at eight years old. Or as if I haven’t spent most of my adult life as a historian and writer involved in understanding human behavior and systems that exploit race, class, gender, sexual orientation in favor of cisgender heterosexual rich White males who feign Christianity as capitalism. Hello! I absolute do get it.

Two things, three things, heck, an infinity of things can be true at the same time, even and especially if they contradict each other. Quantum theory dictates that an electron or some other subatomic particle can be in two places at once and spin in sync with each other at opposite ends of the multiverse. So too it can be true that Mom is a victim of systemic racism, misogynoir, and domestic violence. And it can be equally true that shemade some of the most messed up decisions (out of a limited set of choices) a young Black woman with two kids could make in 1978. Including marrying my idiot stepfather, partly in order to “make” me and my older brother Darren “men.”

Folks, if we are to truly understand the people in our lives, we have to grant them the fulness of their humanity. That means acknowledging that the people we love are imperfect, flawed, cracked and broken, maybe even fucked up human beings. That certainly describes me in full, then and now. I think it’s fair to say much of this about Mom as well.

As for whether I love Mom or not, whether I should ever discuss Mom in terms of my growing-up and adulthood times with her or not, it’s really not for anyone to approve or disapprove. After all, so many of you flaunt your wonderful and great relationships with your moms. It’s so sweet and syrupy and sugary and sticky that it’s almost disgusting. How your mama’s your best friend. How folks best be keepin’ your mama’s name outta their mouths before you get ready to throw down. About the oceans of support and love your mamas deluged you with from the moment of conception to this very nanosecond. It’s a truly wonderful thing. I don’t question it, I nearly always applaud it. I also lament it, because even when I thought I had that kind of relationship with Mom, it was in my head, not in reality. That truth hit me harder than a bullet train on its way to Kyoto running at full speed on my PhD graduation day.

And I do love Mom. I do. At times, she did the absolute best she could. Early on, she did tell me she loved me, ever so often. She never wanted the world of racism and evil to hurt me or leave me dead. I’ve long forgiven her for her vanity, her imperfections, and her many, many tragic mistakes as a parent. (Trust me, as a father, I’ve made my own mistakes, but I’ve made a point of always owning up to them.) But I am not God, and with this long memory of mine — usually but not always a blessing — I cannot forget everything that happened on Mom’s watch. Nor can I forget the denials of such from her throughout most of my adult life.

So where am I now? In a state of constant awkwardness on the subject of Mom, especially around her birthday. It’s really difficult to find a birthday card that says “I love you” but doesn’t go into “You’re the greatest, Mom!” or “You’re the reason for every good thing that’s happened in my life” mode. So folks, please just grant me my truth. Just listen without denial, deflection, defense, justification, or excuse. And I’ll promise to keep my envy of your love-enveloping relationship with yo’ moms to a minimum.

This past weekend, Mom turned seventy years old. 70! Wow! I sent her a plant with orange blossom roses, a vase and a candle setting, which arrived on time for her birthday on Saturday. We had a good phone conversation about the gift and about her day. When I turned the conversation to what she planned to do for her big day, she said she might “go to the Red Lobster at Cross County [Mall].” That was disappointing, but also somewhat expected. After a lifetime of drama, abuse, and pain, maybe a relatively peaceful weekend of phone calls, well wishes, and a table for one at Red Lobster is really all Mom can aspire to seven decades in.

I’ve thought a lot about Mom the last few days. Especially in light of my mother-in-law’s last two years of dementia and decline. Mom’s been a hard worker in her life, but not a strategic one. Mom dedicated a good portion of her life to relationships with men, to two abysmal marriages, and to the basic provisions for raising six kids. None of which she did with inspiration and passion, for none of this was what she dreamed for herself. Mom, when focused, could and did learn, but she’s not a particularly curious person, or a person devoted to learning new things. Mom was also one of the most vain persons I knew growing up. Despite $16,600/year for eight in most of the ’80s, would preen and primp for going on The Avenue (South Side Mount Vernon’s shopping district, Fourth Avenue) like it was an evening gala at the Met.

The good news and bad news about only being a bit more than 22 years younger than my Mom is that I have observed her growth and lack thereof for so many years. Some people say that to have a younger mother is to have someone who grows up with you while you’re growing up. No, not really. I was Mom’s second kid. My brother Darren came two years and eighteen days before me. Between my alcoholic, losing-one-good-job-after-another, seventh-grade-education dad and a full-time job at Mount Vernon Hospital, where was the time for Mom to grow as a young adult?

At the same time, I know this. At twenty, I had barely begun to know myself as a history student, writer, and human being. I had tons of thoughts, but often couldn’t find a way to articulate them fully. At 22, I was better at all these things, but not so much better that I could determine how I would raise one child, much less two. And before my wife of now more than seventeen years, I never saw myself getting married. Heck, I didn’t start regularly having sex until I was twenty-one!

Mom made a lot of decisions in her younger years by letting men and friends and circumstances — and really, fear — decide for her. Then, she played increasingly bad hands, each more laughable as they were more oppressive to all of us. Domestic violence, child abuse, grinding poverty, being Hebrew-Israelites. These barely scratch the surface of the emotional, psychological, and even spiritual torture Mom endured until she was 42.

Mom with my son Noah at 616, August 4, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins).

But you know something? I endured all of this as well. Because, when you are a keenly aware son of a Black woman going through all this, and you decide that you must help, that you must act, you take on the same burdens and the same pains. Being keenly aware isn’t the same thing as knowing what I signed up for, though. Certainly not at twelve, not at twenty, not even at 32. I only knew that I had taken on too much growing up after my son was born fourteen years ago.

Someone on my Twitter feed said recently that he couldn’t believe the cats who would get on Twitter to criticize their moms. I’m not arguing that grown-ass men should criticize their mothers on Twitter. Nor should that put them on pedestals. If we are doing too much of either of those, we’re not seeing our mothers as real human beings, ordinary and flawed like most others. Except that they carried us in their wombs, birthed us, and even under circumstances as crushing as mine, attempted to raise and nurture.

My relationship with Mom will always be complicated by the fact that I know more than most people ought to know about their mothers. Mom couldn’t hide, Mom couldn’t protect, even on the many occasions she did try. Since I couldn’t hide or protect, I just went out and did all I could to help her help herself. Only that by the time we’d driven off my idiot stepfather in ’89, the damage, the depression, the PTSD, was already fully manifest. The fire at 616 and having the burden of my younger siblings made it worse.

Now that Mom is a septuagenarian, it would be interesting to know how she looks back at her life, to see how she sees her years spent on Earth. I wonder because for so many years, the only thing Mom desired was for “the Rapture to come and take her up.” I wonder because nearly all of her southern Black migrant friends from her first decade in the Bronx and in Mount Vernon are dead. I wonder because I’m not sure how it is that she’s managed to make it to 70 under the constant strain that has been most of her life.

I have no idea if Mom has ever read or will ever read my blog. I know others around her have. If she is reading, I want her to know that I do love her, and want for her seventies to be her best decade ever. I want her to want to learn, to finally find herself, to take up projects, to travel and explore a bit, even if it’s only Manhattan. I want her to find some meaning in life, even if it’s only the size of a speck.

I am now three full decades removed from Moving Day 1987, the final Wednesday in August, when I moved for my freshman year of college to Pittsburgh. I was leaving Mount Vernon and 616, but neither would begin to leave me, at least for another year or so.

It was a day of days. But really, it wasn’t the hardest leaving day I faced. In the summers I’d come home to work and watch after my younger siblings, the end of those Augusts were tearful ones. I played music for me and my siblings to sing to before I left at the end of the summer of ’88. I added an extra week to my stay in 1990, just so I could spend extra time with Maurice, Yiscoc, Sarai, and Eri, teaching them how to ride a bike and how to tie their shoes, and missed a week’s worth of classes at Pitt to start the fall. Even in ’92, when I came back to 616 to work for two months that summer at Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health because I couldn’t find a teaching gig at Pitt, I stayed an extra week. That was my life outside of college, grad school, and Pittsburgh for a good decade after my first trip to Pittsburgh. It got easier to leave as my life became about working, teaching, dating, and writing, but leaving was always hard.

My hardest leaving day was in late-August 1989. After a full summer of work, between two jobs, the end of my Mom’s marriage (finally!), my older brother Darren moving out, and my schedule of activities with the younger Gang of Four, I saw going back to the University of Pittsburgh for my third year as a vacation. But it wasn’t going to be one for Mom. She would be completely on her own with my younger siblings for the first time once I left. And I knew the thought of being with them without any help, or least, without any enemies at 616 to war against (like my idiot ex-stepfather Maurice) terrified her.

I stayed an extra five days before leaving on August 30, because Mom still had two weekends of summer courses left to finish at Westchester Business institute. Mom made the decision to not finish up her business law and accounting classes that session the Saturday before I left. She said to me, “Go on to Pittsburgh, Donald. I’ll be all right.” It didn’t make sense to me. She had an A in the business law class, and likely could’ve talked with her instructor about taking an incomplete and then the final exam once my siblings started school after Labor Day. I said as much, but Mom, per usual, didn’t listen to me. She ended up with a D in the business law course, and an F, of course, in the accounting class. Mom wouldn’t return to Westchester Business Institute to finish up her associate’s degree until January 1996.

I felt guilty at the time that I put my own education over my Mom’s. I felt guilty that I couldn’t help out more. Mostly, I felt guilty that despite what I saw back then as “my responsibilities to the family,” I wanted to leave, and part of me wanted to stay gone. I didn’t want to come home for Christmas, my birthday, and New Year’s every single holiday season. I didn’t want to spend my summers living at 616 while working in Mount Vernon or White Plains. And though I wanted to help the Gang of Four out as much as I could, I would’ve preferred bringing them to Pittsburgh, and not going back to Mount Vernon over and over again.

Looking back, though, I realized the truth. Mom really didn’t enjoy school. Mom decided to go to Westchester Business Institute because I was in college. And as a professor who has taught hundreds of adult learners (students twenty-five and sometimes much older), I know that earning a degree with your kids can be a great motivator for enrolling in higher ed. It just can’t be the only motivator. At some point, it has to be about more than a friendly familial competition or even about using the degree to earn a few extra dollars. It has to be about improving yourself and the people around you. Mom wasn’t ready to juggle that burden, and likely had gone through too much that summer to spend another fifteen months in school while also watching after my younger siblings.

Boy, it was hard to leave that last Wednesday in August ’89. I was nervous for Mom, sad for my siblings, and maybe even a little angry with Mom and God about the impossible choice I thought I had made at the time. But I reminded myself that I wouldn’t be any good to anyone if I couldn’t finish my degree and use it to help others. I reminded myself that I was still only nineteen years old, that, my outward maturity and 616 aside, I still had a lot to learn about life.

“I took care of my kids! I put food on the table, put a roof over y’all’s heads, put clothes on yo’ back! I did the best that I could, and none of y’all can tell me different…” That’s what my Mom yelled at us the day before Sarai’s funeral seven Julys ago. It was an excited utterance, after she had spent five days in a trance, unable to do as much as eat a piece of toast. We were in the living room of Mom’s flat at 616, me, Mom, Maurice, Yiscoc and Eri, being yelled at over a lifetime of disappointment and frustration. Ours and hers.

Today is my brother Yiscoc’s thirty-sixth birthday. That he’s here at all is a bit of a miracle. Especially with the number of times he ran away from 616 between 1989 (when he was eight years old) and 1994, with his one-time video game addiction, and with muggers and pedophiles out there and all too willing to take advantage of a vulnerable preteen.

I started with Mom, though, for a reason. Her yelling at us was probably meant for me, but it was in response to Yiscoc, who shared a personal secret with her for the first time. Mom’s response was to defend her record as a parent, to tell us that we had no right to judge, critique, or assess her record. That she added, “That’s what you get for…” in response to Yiscoc’s tearful sharing session was shameful and disgusting.

“But you don’t understand, your Mom was mourning the loss of her only daughter,” would be the response of Mom-defenders everywhere. To which I say, really? Your Mom’s response is to push four of your five living children away with a tirade? One where she says, “this fucked up, piece of shit life I helped set up for all of you was the best I could do, and if you don’t like it, that’s on you, and you can kiss my Black ass!” Would that really be acceptable under any circumstances, much less during a week of mourning?

Yiscoc ran away from home, hung out with several wrong crowds, and dropped out of Mount Vernon High School a year and a half before he could have completed his coursework. Seventeen years later, and Yiscoc still doesn’t have his GED (the last two times, he failed the social studies portion of the exam — ain’t that a kicker!). I’m not laying all of this at my Mom’s feet. But Yiscoc’s adult life wasn’t exactly set up for success by his growing up years. The normative permanence of systemic racism on the one hand, and domestic violence, welfare poverty, and the 616 fire of 1995 that left Yiscoc and my other younger siblings temporarily homeless on the other, would make any kid itching to run away.

A second younger brother has now reached the second half of his thirties. Yiscoc’s the same age I was eleven and a half years ago, when I began working on Boy @ The Window in earnest. One of the things I figured out in writing such a torturous book was that I blamed myself for so many of my parents’/legal guardian’s failures and sins. I had blamed myself for not putting an end to the domestic violence at 616 since I was twelve, for not doing enough to support Mom and my younger siblings since I went away to college at Pitt in 1987. I also came to understand how much Mom deflected, defended, and denied when it came to her parenting, especially when we called on her to do more than find temporary shelter, meager food options, and threadbare clothing. Mom was and remains one of the vainest and unaffectionate people I have ever known — vain, insecure, and likely clinically depressed.

I also know that Mom has passed these traits down to each of us. I’ve been dealing directly with them for three decades. I’m not sure Yiscoc has ever peered behind his mask long enough to see Mom lurking in the shadows, warts and all. If he has or ever will, it has been or will be an ugly sight. But if we are truly attempting to rebuild and remake ourselves, it is a sight we must endure. A painful process of honesty, soul-searching, revelation, and admitting that on some level, we’ve fucked up, and been fucked up, by life, oppression, and parenting.

Happy Birthday, Yiscoc. Know that despite everything, I do love you. I hope that this next year brings you closer to the person you want and need to be.

Show art from SyFy’s 12 Monkeys (the home of alternative timelines), March 2016. (http://syfy.com).

Mother’s Day Week 1997 was one of triumph, betrayal, and deep self-reflection, helping to shape my last two decades. On that fateful Sunday, I finished preparing my transparencies for the overhead projector that I would need to use for my job talk on multiculturalism, race, and education at Teachers College the next day. My then-girlfriend Angelia came over around 1 pm, helped me pack as we talked about the job, my research, her missing me for the next few days, and my wishing I could take her with me to New York. Then we called a cab, went out to Pittsburgh International Airport, and I boarded my 6 pm flight bound for La Guardia.

The next day, that second Monday in May 1997, went well despite barely six hours of sleep (a typical night for me now). I met with Teachers College faculty, graduate students, a department chair, an assistant dean, and the dean. I gave my all-important job talk, fielded questions, and otherwise felt that I brought my heat in this potentially life-changing interview. By 4 pm, it was over, I was exhausted, but I was more than content. I figured I made myself a tough out at worst, and gave myself a real chance at this assistant professor job at best.

I spent the night in Manhattan at the Hotel Beacon, and ordered room service, instead of going out to Barnes & Noble or Tower Records. I had to rest up before going to see my family at their temporary apartment in Yonkers. Refreshed and with my old blank-faced-Donald mask on, I checked out and took the 1 train up to Van Cortlandt, then the Bee-Line bus into Yonkers, where my Mom and younger siblings had been living for a year and a half.

Tuesday was Mom’s graduation day from Westchester Business Institute. After ten years of on-and-off-again enrollment, Mom had finished her associate’s degree in accounting. I was really happy for her. That day from 10 am on was about getting Mom and Maurice, Yiscoc, Sarai, and Eri cleaned up and ready for the long bus trip up Broadway to White Plains, Westchester County Center, and hundreds of other WBI graduates. Of all of us, I think my sister Sarai had the best time. After Mom tossed her cap in the air (and caught it), Sarai begged to put on Mom’s graduation digs. My fourteen-year-old sister walked around for the rest of the night as if she had graduated from college!

Wednesday was a difficult day. I had a noon-ish flight to catch out of La Guardia back to the ‘Burgh, as my own PhD graduation was four days away. Though Mom and I agreed that I didn’t have the funds to fly her out and put her up in Pittsburgh, I didn’t agree that my teenager siblings (all between nearly eighteen and thirteen at this point) couldn’t watch over themselves for two or three days. “Are you kiddin’?,” Mom said when I suggested this, and added, “the kids would tear this mutha up while I’m gone.”

But then, as I was getting packed up to do the Bee-Line Bus, 1 train to Times Square, Shuttle to Grand Central, and cab to LGA, Mom said something that made me happy we decided she wouldn’t be at my graduation. “You know, you were in school so long, you could’ve had another high school diploma.” The scorn with which she said it, it was like someone suddenly stabbed me in the stomach. It was the first time I truly saw Mom’s vanity, possibly even, her jealousy. After I said my goodbyes, promising my brother Maurice that I’d come to his Mount Vernon High School graduation in June, Mom’s sentence of sneering envy was all I thought about on the trip back.

“Maybe it’s a good thing you didn’t invite your mom,” Angelia said after I told her about Mom and her brooding behavior Wednesday evening. “But, this means she will have never seen me at any graduation, seen where I’ve lived the past ten years, seen how hard I worked,” I cried. Angelia got up from her dining room table, walked around to my side, sat in my lap, and gave me a hug. I’m so glad she didn’t let go, and let me cry myself out on her shoulder and chest for a few minutes.

I woke up in Angelia’s bed Thursday morning, having slept past 9 am. It was the most sleep I’d had in five days. I was remarkably refreshed. I rarely stayed over at Angelia’s because the back of her third-floor flat was practically an urban wildlife reserve, between the raccoons, squirrels, pigeons, cardinals, blue jays, rabbits, and the occasional deer. Not this morning. They seemed to know I needed not to hear them that morning.

The next three days were a blur. I ran around Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon and Pitt saying formal goodbyes to a few colleagues and former professors, something I wouldn’t have had time for if Mom had been in Pittsburgh with me. Angelia and I spend most of Saturday with her mommy, and then with my friend Laurell, Laurell’s sister Naomi, and their charge Archie. It would be the only time anyone from my Humanities days would witness me graduate with one of my Pittsburgh degrees.

That Sunday, May 18, was going to be a scorcher of a day. I was to be on stage as part of the tent-revival-as-graduation ceremony at CMU (as they did for all the PhD graduates). But there was no way I’d wear a full suit. So I compromised. I put on a shirt and tie under my gown, wore my baggy basketball shorts for bottoms, and put on shoes and dress socks to complete this goofy yet comfortable picture. I marched across the stage and shook Peter Stearns‘ hand, as he was the dean of humanities and social sciences at CMU then. Too bad I didn’t say what I thought about his fast food approach to teaching and learning to him in that moment.

But, after that first ceremony, the individual and group pictures, a bunch of folks had to leave. Laurell, Naomi, and Archie had to get back to Virginia for yet another week of school — that’s what happens between two school teachers and an eighth-grader for graduation attendees. My friends Ed and James had errands to run, and Angelia’s mom had some church-related affairs to get to. So, for the moment, it was just me and Angelia, walking from CMU to The University Club, by Pitt’s Thackeray Hall.

We get there, in this quiet room, with seven burgundy diploma holders, sitting on a table that staff had covered in this dark blue velvet cloth. My now former advisor, Joe Trotter, arrived a few minutes later. I’d only seen him once in the six months since he finally approved my dissertation, ending what had been a two-year ordeal of betrayal, slights, and threats while writing my 505-page tome. Yet, all I was thinking was, “Why are we doing the departmental ceremony in a building in the middle of Pitt’s campus?”

CMU leather diploma album, May 17, 2017. (Donald Earl Collins).

Steve Schlossman, the history department chair, was this ceremony’s emcee. He introduced each of us, our research, any awards we may have won, and our dissertation advisors, all as he handed us our doctorates. I was second on the list to go up and receive my diploma, shake hands with Schlossman and Trotter. I did say a few words, mostly about hard work and perseverance. “With God and faith, and of course, my girlfriend Angelia, even though that word ‘girlfriend’ hardly defines who you are to me, I wouldn’t be standing here right now. Thank you.” That was how I ended my three-and-a-half minute speech.

There was a small reception afterward, and like most CMU ceremonies I’d been a part of since 1993, this one was nearly blindly boring. Except that my friend James did show up and gave me a pat on the back and a handshake. Except that my dear friend and mentor Barbara Lazarus came and gave me a big hug. Except that Angelia had insisted on taking pictures of me from the time I got up to get my degree until the moment we left.

We were out around 6:30 pm. It had rained and poured, as thunderstorms had rolled through during the second ceremony. I wish Mom could’ve been there, seen what I had seen, felt what I was feeling. But, knowing what I knew now, the personal triumph that this graduation day was couldn’t be diminished. I had long since stopped living for what Mom wanted me to be — a sounding board, a babysitter, an extra source of income. For the first time, I no longer felt guilt about not going back to New York after my undergraduate years at Pitt, ready to bail my family out of poverty on a $25,000-a-year salary. For the first time, I realize Mom’s burdens were never mine to carry.

This past weekend marked four decades since my Mom and my late one-time stepfather (though not quite in 1977) Maurice moved me and my older brother from South Side Mount Vernon to an apartment complex three blocks from the Mount Vernon-Pelham border. This is much more a memorial of remembrance than of anything to celebrate.

For me, it was part of an endless series of storms. Mom had filed for divorce with my father and had decided to move in with her allegedly new boyfriend Maurice (who wasn’t so new, as I’d learn years later). My father Jimme’s alcoholism had gotten worse. He had drowned my Mom’s clothes in a bathtub, thrown a color TV out of our second-floor window, and stomped in a glass coffee table during dinner after my seventh birthday in response to the cheating and the divorce. My Mom ended up in the hospital for two months due to the stress and her kidneys, which had almost shut down due to her nonexistent diet. Add to all this the sexual abuse that I had suffered while Mom and Jimme were going at it during the centennial summer of ’76. My world was upside down, in shambles, as shattered as glass blown out of a skyscraper by well-placed plastic explosives.

A week ago, my thirteen-year-old son asked me, “Did you ever live in a house?” Even though I had talked about my life before the move to 616 East Lincoln Avenue before, it had been a few years. I think my son asked because of our plans to move out of our “luxury” high-rise after fourteen years. The truth is, I have lived in four homes over the years. But in my first seven years (with 240 East Third as a notable exception during my Mom’s illness), I grew up in three houses: 24 Adams Street, 48 Adams Street, and 425 South Sixth Avenue. We lived in one-bedroom flats in the first two homes, where we shared a kitchen and a bathroom with one other family. I have memories of playing in the front yards of both, of older neighbors (by toddler standards) hosing down their cars, of older kids and teenagers at the Adams Street Park on monkey bars and shooting hoops. I even remember the day my Mom told me we were moving to 425 South Sixth, August 12, 1974. It was the same week I burned my knee on an over door, the same week Richard Nixon announced his resignation from the presidency.

At 425, we had a two-bedroom, one-bath flat, on the second floor, with a separate entrance. It was as close to owning a home as we got during those years. And boy did my Mom and Jimme blow it! Between the sexual abuse incident and my unconscious attempts at self-erasure, even suicide, 425 never quite felt like home.

The move to 616 occurred about a week after my Uncle Sam clotheslined my father like he was the late Deacon Jones and Jimme was a running back whose career was coming to a crashing halt. I remember it being the second Friday in April, near Easter Sunday time. It had warmed up from the frozen winter of ’77 to the light chills of early spring. But I didn’t feel particularly warmed up inside.

It didn’t help that where we end up moving didn’t look at all like the newer — if more impoverished — series of apartment complexes down the street on Pearsall Drive. It wasn’t the first time I’d been in an apartment building. But from the first time I walked into the A section of 616, I didn’t like it. The vestibule was too dark, the elevator too slow, and the building too smelly for my tastes. Plus, because of the haste of the move and the damage my father had done to our furniture, me and my older brother Darren didn’t even have a bed. From April to December ’77, we slept on the floor or on the couch in the new living room or in our eventual bedroom, with Mom and Maurice staying up sometimes until Johnny Carson time watching sitcoms and the news. So many times in those first months, I felt like I was a rag doll that had been hurriedly thrown into a box marked “Miscellaneous.” I was along for whatever ride Mom and Maurice were on, a permanent reminder of yesterday’s marital storms, a yoke on whatever future they had in mind.

I acted out repeatedly the first twenty months after the move. I chewed on a red-and-blue-striped t-shirt until I had swallowed about a third of it. I began biting and eating my nails until I made the skin underneath bleed. I stuffed sandwiches into the holes I made in my coats, and ate every booger my nose could expel as a substitute for lunch. That’s how much I hated Mom, Maurice, myself, my life, and 616 forty years ago.

Mom and Maurice tried to explain it away as simple selfish jealousy, that as a soft mama’s boy, I wanted Mom to myself. That’s only about twenty or twenty-five percent accurate. What I did know was that Maurice wasn’t my dad, yet Mom foisted him on us as if Jimme had died and none of us had any other choice. What I did know was that I was hurting, and since I was getting an ass-whuppin’ about once a week, I couldn’t lash out. What I did know was that not a single neighbor or kid in the building, especially the Bagleys, welcomed our presence in the building or my existence at 616.

With what I’ve learned about Mom, Maurice, Jimme, myself, and my neighbors since ’77, it’s a wonder I didn’t go up to the roof and just throw myself off it those first two years, or in ’82, ’83, or ’84. God knows I ran away enough, got beat up enough times, and was called “faggot” often enough to see slamming myself into the slate sidewalk leading to 616’s front stairs as a better alternative to living. College was the first opportunity I got to get away from this living hell, and I took full advantage.

Mom and my two youngest siblings still live at 616. The youngest barely remembers the end of the abuse and chaos that I lived through and Mom put up with. The other sibling has horrible memories of his own. After the fire at 616 in ’95, when Mom asked me for advice about where to move after the renovations, I told her, “Anywhere but back to 616.” Mom, as nearly always, didn’t listen to me. I guess misery is as addicting as anything else.

My Mom and my Uncle Sam are in Houston, Texas/Bradley, Arkansas this week, burying their father and my grandfather, who died ten days ago, just three weeks after his 97th birthday. Given what they’ve told me so far, it seems like they’ve been treated as outsiders by my extended family of uncles, aunts, grand uncles and aunts, and cousins that I barely know or whom I’ve never met. They’ve learned some embarrassing stuff as well, details that I will not go into here. I had been conflicted about going versus not going, especially given that I’d only met my grandfather once, in June 2001, and that wasn’t a pleasant visit, at least environmentally speaking. After the past few days, I’m definitely glad I didn’t go.

I do feel bad for my Mom and Uncle Sam, though. And not just the natural empathy of feeling for your kin when their father passes away either. I feel for them because they are part of a family dynamic that has gone on for nearly a half-century without their input and with a limited bit of shunning as well. Some of this may well be deliberate, but most of this is natural, as time and distance has meant limited understanding and inclusion between my uncles and aunts with the New York Gills since the time of my birth in 1969. But some of this is about embarrassment, too. My Mom and my Uncle Sam’s lives haven’t exactly been a bowl of pitted cherries with whipped cream, either.

This is a topic that I’ve known all too well with my own family over the past three decades. One example would be the next to last day of 1988, the first year in which I rediscovered myself as someone other than an emotionally wounded twelve-year-old. It was a day of both eye-opening lies and hidden truths, a moment of unexpected boldness and moments of seeing familiar faces and places with different eyes.

It was the day my friend and former high school classmate Laurell decided to pick me up from 616 to spend time with her, as well as her friend Nicole, our former eighth-grade Algebra teacher Jeanne Longerano, and eventually, our mutual acquaintances JD and Josh. It was a day I was forced to code switch, to traverse my 616 world, my former Humanities world, and maintain my new conception of myself at the same time. It wasn’t exactly my Miles Davis moment:

What I discuss in different parts of Boy @ The Window, but not in this particular scene, was the exact nature of “too disgusting” at 616. Let’s see. Blotches of gray and black stains on a salmon-colored area rug around a 19-inch television set in the living room. On top of the rug was my then stepfather Maurice who was laid out in nothing but his size-54 underwear. This meant that most of his 400-plus pound fatty bulk was exposed for anyone to see. A cobble of broken down sofas, busted chairs, and a

kitchen table with hanger wire connecting each of its three remaining legs to the tabletop. Kitchen, hallway, and bathroom walls stained with grape jelly, crayons, and even feces. Dust balls the size of Matchbox cars in the hallway, lined up as if in rush-hour traffic. And the never-ending smell of cigarette smoke, overused cooking oil, and farts from eight human beings between the ages of four and forty-one. Seriously, what would anyone else have done under the circumstances, especially now that I was a fully awake college-aged student? I wasn’t acting just out of embarrassment or just to protect my Mom from embarrassment. I was acting to protect Laurell as well.

Contrast 616 with what happened next on December 30, 1988, between The Price is Right’s first Showcase Showdown and the end of The Bold and the Beautiful on CBS (roughly, between 11:25 am and 2 pm):

Afterward, we went down the street to the nearest pizza shop, and hung out until midafternoon, telling each other what we thought would be the best thing to say. Even me. I didn’t talk about homelessness, or a semester without money for food, or living in a deathtrap in the South Oakland section of Pittsburgh. Laurell did give me a heartfelt hug after dropping me off at 616, still puzzled about why I wouldn’t let her and Nicole visit with my family. Hopefully, after years as a high school math teacher, she understands better now.

Even though my Mom and Uncle Sam are obviously just as much Gill as the rest of my extended family in Texas, Arkansas (and Washington State, Louisiana, and elsewhere), they’re not part of the everyday that my other uncles, aunts, grand aunts and uncles, and cousins have had with each other for decades. So the extended Gills cannot see my Mom and my uncle and their struggles the same way they see their own. Nor can my extended Gills see those things that may be embarrassing to my Mom and my uncle the same way either. It makes for a bewildering family dynamic. And this in many ways explains well why so many families have a hard time being families, in the closeness (and closest) meaning of the word.

Dysfunction is so much a part of families these days. but even in dysfunction, you can learn truths about yourself, especially in moments of life, death, and in my case, rebirth.

There's also a Kindle edition on Amazon.com. The enhanced edition can be read only with Kindle Fire, an iPad or a full-color tablet. The links to the enhanced edition through Apple's iBookstore and the Barnes & Noble NOOK edition are below. The link to the Amazon Kindle version is also immediately below: